Friday of the Twenty-seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 465

Gird yourselves and weep, O priests!
wail, O ministers of the altar!
Come, spend the night in sackcloth,
O ministers of my God!
The house of your God is deprived
of offering and libation.

I am reading a biography of the American poet, Walt Whitman. Doctor Reynolds has reminded me that the United States has a long history of religious relativism. That is, the belief that all religions are the same; there's only one God; it doesn't matter if you attend church or not, believe or not, etc. 

Most Americans are deists, believing that the God who might exist left the building a long time ago. Whitman, despite his nostalgia for the agrarian society of his youth with its family-based economy, could not remember when the family worshiped together. 

Not many Americans can. But the problem is hardly new, as we discover in reading the Bible. In today's first reading the prophet Joel laments the neglect of God's temple, which "is deprived of offering and libation." He goes on to warn the people of impending disaster, "Yes, it is near, a day of darkness and of gloom, a day of clouds and somberness! He foretells an ecological disaster: 

Like dawn spreading over the mountains, a people numerous and mighty! Their like has not been from of old, nor will it be after them, even to the years of distant generations.

The invading army is a cloud of locusts, darkening the sky and consuming every leaf of vegetation on the ground. This "army" is more thorough, relentless and mindless than an army of human warriors. Armed men might grow weary of killing; they might show some compunction to their victim; they might not search every nook and cranny for victims. But insects -- like earthquakes and hurricanes -- don't care who or what they destroy, and they miss nothing.
The Hebrew prophets believed God set these "natural disasters" in motion to punish his people for their infidelity.
It's not hard to read that punishment into the ecological crises we face today. Although we meant no harm when we created the automobile culture and the drug industry and the consumer economy, we would not uproot these ingrained practices when we saw their devastation.
Perhaps, had our faith not been deprived of offering and libation, we would have retained the maturity and flexibility to adapt before the problems became crises. We would have remained obedient to the truth as it appeared to us, instead of to our habits and false belief that "it will all work out in the end." 

There is still time to repent. Life on earth will persist for millions of years, and it can wait until we change our ways; but the consequences of human suffering will not wait. Future generations will wonder why we hesitated to repent in the face of the obvious for so long.